Saturday, June 20, 2009

A few weeks ago, I went with Jenn and her family to see Mary Poppins at the Cadillac Theatre in Chicago. Ever since, I have had Mary Poppins songs in my hand - one of them being the title of this post. In addition, the hobby store here in town has had a sign for kites. So I've really wanted to fly a kite for a few weeks now. Today, Jenn and I went out to the farm for lunch and then we came back into town to find a kite. Unfortunately, the hobby store was closed so we went down to Family Dollar and found a $4 Spiderman kite. I was pretty convinced that we wouldn't have enough string so we headed to Ace and found kite string. We came back to the house and went over to the old ball field across the road and starting flying the kite. The wind was acting kind of strange because it would be quite gusty and then almost no wind at all. So we took turns trying to get it up in the air. Just when we thought we had it, the wind would stop and the kite would dive back to the ground. Finally, we ended up getting the kite up a good height and payed off the entire spool of kite string. We sang a little bit and then just like that the kite took a dive and ended up in the fence by the football field. We ended salvaging the kite and most of the string.

Later, I thought more about flying kite and it kind of reminded me about life. The journey is certainly filled with a lot of highs and lows. Some days we really are soaring to the highest heights, but the reality of it is we live in a broken world. With this brokenness can some some pretty serious nose dives. I guess in my life, these highs and lows are most clear in my work (perhaps incorrectly translated in my mind as purpose). My expectations are often way too high for me and for others. Of course, this often leads to disappointment and frustration. At work, I also have profound desires to improve, communicate, meet goals, and positively impact others. Of course, these desires can also lead to disappointments and frustrations. Finally, I just struggle with something so deep - a longing to make a difference in the world. At its worst, all this leads to incredible feelings of doubt - almost a sort of numbness.

In all of this, it is incredibly hard to distinguish between self-talk, God's voice, the voices of friends, emotions, and logical thinking. My hope is that prayer and reflection on scripture will help to clear out some of the clutter squelching God's voice.